Happened to me twice on 2 seperate drives. In both cases, I was able to recover everything. The recovery software treated the files like they were deleted. As long as nothing new is written to the drive, deleted files should be completely recoverable.

I was lucky in that I was able to catch it. I fear for larger post houses who might write to the drive before realizing what happened. Those people are surely screwed.

It happened to me this past Saturday morning. I had heard of the file deletion issue from the Tech Support people at my job, went home to check on my files and every jpeg, mov, Raw and PSD file on my media drive was gone. The folders were preserved, everything inside wiped! I do have a backup, but it will still take quite a while to restore about 2TB of media.

All I have is a C drive and a 2TB media drive in my PC running Windows 7 Pro. I always kept the Media Cache on the media drive in Media Cache folders. I would select the root and Premiere would create the folders. Apparently, not this version. I double checked the location settings and it showed a path to the root of the media drive. I tried to move it back to the System drive and I would get a pop up message stating that I did not have permission to use the C drive when I'm the Admin. Strange. I tried deleting the prefs, but I guess since I also have 2015.2 installed, they wouldn't completely reset.

Next, I set up an external hard drive via USB 3. I was able to move the Media Cache there. Then I set the prefs to "do not automatically delete." Then, I inadvertently killed the power to my external drive when I launched Premiere. It then notified me that the Media Cache folder could not be found and that it would be placed in the "default" location. I let it do it and double checked the directory. The proper folders were created on my C drive.

So, I'm still in the process of restoring my files and have automatic delete turned off. What media has been restored has not been deleted.

Looking forward to that fix as I also suggested to my employer to upgrade. I'll let you know if I still have a job when I get in...

On May 4th, my media team at UC Berkeley lost 14TB worth of data from our file server, just over two years worth of projects- almost everything from our shared volume with the exception of some folder structures. A few days before, we upgraded to the latest version of Premiere. We've got six editors and two motion graphics artists all running Premiere and sharing access to this server, which we all work from. Thankfully, we were able to recover a lot of it because we have backups, but it took several days (two of which were overtime days for our IT guy), but it's so disgusting to hear that it was our very production software that did this to us.

How is a bug like this even possible? Why is Premiere even allowed to instantaneously wipe an entire volume worth of data? How did a bug like that make it through beta testing? I hope whoever signed off on that rollout is now looking for another job.

How Adobe presented this is totally not acceptable, it was nay impossible to find this thread. Also even the 11.1.1 patch notes do not even mention this problem. There needs to be a sticky & email to all accounts with a recommendation for all 11.1 users to perform the recent patch or entire disk array directories could be deleted.

Thank you Patrick for the notification of the update. I booted my PC and wanted to see if the Cloud app would notify me of the update. After 15 minutes, it did not. I opened the app and there it was: Premiere 11.1.1 and Audition 10.1.1.

For Premiere the addition of the Essential Graphics panel "and more" is mentioned. I would love for someone to confirm that this disaster is indeed fixed. I'm concerned that we may not because that would imply a mistake on Adobe's part. How crazy is this?

Good luck all...

BK

Mod note: Edited for content. Please do not mention legal issues on Adobe forums. It is against our community guidelines.

On 4/19 I discovered that 500GB of PHOTOS on my 2nd internal hard drive were missing, with empty folders left in their places. I thought it was System Mechanic as a defrag had run on that drive right about the time they disappeared. My Media Cache was on that drive.

Because I can't open GH5 10-bit files in the latest PP, I've gone back one version. Does this version have this problem?

And my biggest question: Since Adobe knows who pays them every month to license this software, why haven't they notified everyone by email?

I have lost 1,5 TB (20.000 Euros!!!), needed 3 days to rebuild my data with EasUs (80 Euros - btw very good recovery program) and bought one new external drive (200 Euros). Hey ADOBE it´s not enough, offering an update after two weeks, letting your users alone in a very desperate situation!!! The past two weeks, were the worst of my professional life. We were on the edge of ruins.

This is one of the reasons I don't use a mirroring backup process. I use WinMerge to manually check for differences between my source and backup files, and just discovered other missing files from the same drive.

Adobe, how about emailing all of your licensed PP customers so they have a better chance of recovering or preventing the problem?

The latest update (11.1.1) has changed the behavior of the media cache preferences. Instead of deleting files in the selected media cache folder based on the cache management policy preference, only files located in application created in sub directories will be subject for deletion.

To be more specific... only files located within the folders Media Cache Files, Peak Files, or Team Projects Cache will be affected by the Media Cache management settings selected in your Premiere Pro preferences. No other files in any other folders will be touched after updating to version 11.1.1

Is this a Mac only issue? I've read the instructions to update to v 11.1.1 however my creative cloud (on Windows) doesn't show any update options. I'm getting very nervous with the GH5 10bit problems and now this. . .

From the Creative Cloud app, look under the gear icon in the top right corner and choose Check for App Updates. The option to update didn't show up for me until I did that. I updated my windows Premiere Pro to 11.1.1 this morning.

What the...? How did you know about a patch when I received absolutely no notification? As the guy who started this thread you'd think that the Adobe staff who monitor this thread would give me a heads up. I getting more and more discouraged with Adobe on this issue, beginning to think they don't care.

Don't get the bits & parts of Adobe mixed up ... the staff around here are almost all within Product Support ... for the Digital Video Apps (DVA's) ... and they are not on the product teams. Further, there aren't enough P-S staffers to monitor every thread and post. They get around as much as they can.

There is communication between the two, the product teams & product support ... but perhaps not as much as most of us would assume. And they are different management areas.

What the...? How did you know about a patch when I received absolutely no notification? As the guy who started this thread you'd think that the Adobe staff who monitor this thread would give me a heads up. I getting more and more discouraged with Adobe on this issue, beginning to think they don't care.

In Adobe product support, we do care. In fact, we are the ones that identified this issue and pushed for the update. Sorry if your expectation was that we would contact you once the issue was resolved. Unfortunately, we just don't have the manpower in the support realm to triage and respond to each and every post. I do really wish we had more employees to help here but that's not possible at this time.

The patch went out at midnight last night. I did stay up and updated the KB documentation, but I had to get some sleep soon thereafter and could not respond on individual threads at that time. Sorry for the delayed info and response. By updating, you will be clear of this bug.

I hear what you're saying and I appreciate all the effort. I was hoping for a general notification to the forum and this thread. I kept checking the creative cloud app for an update and seeing none (I didn't know about having to check the gear icon as typically updates just appear in the app). Then there was Brad Smith this morning who's not staff announcing a patch. I'm asking myself, how does he know and I don't? I felt like an airline passenger sweating in coach while the plane sits on the tarmac, and there no information. That's what motivated me to speak out (albeit somewhat harshly).

Again, I apologize for the delay in disseminating this information to the community. I now have everything I need to go forth and spread the word.

It is a different issue that the Creative Cloud application did not alert you to the update. Let me look into that for you and see if I can find out what's going on there. Thank you so much for bringing that to my attention.

I had 5 folders on my 2nd (non-system) internal hard drive, and I had my Media Cache folder as a separate folder on that drive. Most of the folders on one of the other high-level folders were empty, as well as random other folders in another folder.

Regarding the notification issue, I don't think that the systems folks who write the patches should be responsible for getting the word directly to customers, but I do think that there should be a process in place within Adobe where, when a critical issue such as this where a bug in the software DELETES CUSTOMER'S DATA, that you can inform the appropriate group who would then immediately notify all paying subscribers so they can take appropriate action to protect their data. I'm sure you're working hard and doing your job the best you can, but there's a big hole in the communication system. I don't expect my mechanic to notify me when there's a recall for a safety issue, but I do expect Toyota to have a process in place that notifies me.

As do the Federal government. However, comparing auto safety to video editing is an apples to oranges scenario. But, releasing alpha software that seriously endangers someones' ability to earn a living brings the comparison a bit closer.

Usually I've had to spend 2-3 days troubleshooting each update to the CC package, most times ending up reverting back to the previous version til a bug-fix was sent out. Adobe has never sent me a single penny in payment for the hours spent troubleshooting a beta that was released as an alpha. Funny that this is the first update that hasn't caused this issue for me, but if I'd not had my media cache on a separate SSD, well...I'd be telling a totally different tale.

I haven't encountered this problem yet, but I have an important question.

My media cache is located on my C: drive in the usual appdata/roaming/Adobe/Common directory. My actual projects are located on separate hard drives. So now I'm wondering-- does this glitch erase only the files within the cache-drive directory and subdirectories? Or are the materials in other areas of my C: drive in danger?

Because I'd have no way of knowing _if_ this glitch has erased any of my data there. (So far, my projects on other drives are safe.)

In your scenario if you have the preference ON, it will only apply to appdata/roaming/Adobe/Common. With the 11.1.1 change, it will only apply to the sub directories within appdata/roaming/Adobe/Common.

Wanting a simplified process to control & eliminate cache files at need ... and partly because of the old process of parting out the 5/6 main PrPro functions over 5/6 discs ... I've always kept my cache files and media cache database and audio cache & pek files on a separate drive ... that ONLY has the Adobe cache stuff and system paging files on it.

So I've not had any problems at any time, and it's always very clear where to go to manually nuke the cache files.

I'm sure you're working hard and doing your job the best you can, but there's a big hole in the communication system. I don't expect my mechanic to notify me when there's a recall for a safety issue, but I do expect Toyota to have a process in place that notifies me.

I agree with you, Tara. I am looking into a way to provide such an alert for such circumstances. You are right to expect that kind of service and I apologize for our shortcomings in this regard. I will see what I can do to prevent such an incident from occurring to you and our users in the future.

Thanks very much Kevin. Maybe it could be added as a "Critical Alert" to the ACC pop-up that alerts customers to new versions.

I am still confused by the description of the problem and fix. I had my data drive on my PC set as the location for my Media Cache. I had two folders of photos totaling over 500GB on that same data drive, the contents of which were deleted. I thought that specifying a drive other than your C:\ for your Media Cache was a good practice. When I updated to 2017.1, I didn't make any changes to the Media Cache settings, yet the info on Avoid potential deletion of media files in Premiere Pro CC 2017 (11.1) says: "... In the default location for media cache preferences, there is no issue. However, incorrect usage of this feature has the potential for unintentional file deletion." I still am unsure how I used it incorrectly, and my biggest concern at this point is that there are others out there whose files have been deleted, and are still recoverable, but from reading the info provided they would have no idea that they needed to check to see if they're missing any files.

Today I started researching the latest best practices for the location of the Media Cache and each of the Scratch Disk folders. In the blog post about the issue it says "...Files that sit next to it will no longer be affected. However, we still strongly recommend keeping the Media Cache folder separate from your original media." Can you tell me why Adobe is recommending that? It seems like the default of the system drive is a bad choice, performance-wise, and there is a check box on the Media Cache preference that says "Save media cache files next to originals when possible", however based on the warning above, I don't understand why that option would be there. Do you recommend housing the media on a separate drive, and the Media Cache on a 3rd drive? Can it have anything else on it or is the warning there because there might still be a problem and other files on that drive might still be deleted by still-buggy software, or is there another reason? If I do use a 3rd drive for the Media Cache, should I specify that for all of the Scratch Disk folders too? If so, is there a way to set those as the default for every project in the same way you can the Media Cache, or do you have to click on each one and change it for every project?